The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Normanton

  On its release, the film suffered almost universal critical rejection. Members of the audience in both France and Edinburgh were witnessed to faint at the abominable scenes in basement surgery, a situation upon which modern-day promoters would now readily seize. Only the London Observer was appreciative of its artistic merits. For the American release of 1962, the film was drastically edited. It was conferred the indignity of an English-language dub, and retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus. Further to this, shots of the grafting process were removed together with a series of minor scenes alluding to Doctor Génessier’s humanity, particularly his care for a small child at his clinic. This revised feature was only ever conferred a limited theatrical run, and was given little if any recognition. As the years passed, film historians began to acknowledge the true worth in Franju’s film, finally understanding its nuances, and filmmakers of repute such as John Carpenter, Jesús Franco and John Woo would soon attest to its influence. John Carpenter has suggested that Eyes Without a Face inspired the idea for the mask worn by Michael Myers in Halloween (1978). Several years after the release of his masterpiece, he recollected the film crew “didn’t have any money to make a mask. It was originally written the way you see it; in other words, it’s a pale mask with human features, almost featureless”, very similar to that which disguised the face of the melancholic Christiane.

  Eyes Without a Face received a second major theatrical release in September 1986, in conjunction with notable retrospectives at the National Film Theatre in London and the film archive Cinémathèque Française for its fiftieth anniversary in France. As a founder of Cinémathèque Française, the archive celebrated the achievements of Franju by showcasing the director’s back catalogue. The film was later released in its original form to American theatres, rather appropriately on October 31, 2003, with its original running time and title fully restored.

  ORIGINALLY PRODUCED FOR the Japanese market, Faces of Death was announced as a documentary studying the nature of death; it was in truth little more than a “mockumentary” expanding on the success of Antonio Climati’s Savana Violenta (1976). Also marketed under the name The Original Faces of Death, this feature, narrated by Dr Francis B. Gross (Michael Carr), placed faked deaths alongside shocking real-life footage. Special effects artist Allan A. Apone has since admitted almost 40 per cent of this feature’s contents had been feigned; this, however, does not detract from the film’s disturbing impact. The images of cattle waiting to have their throats cut as they stand in line in the slaughterhouse along with baby seals being clubbed to death are as unpleasant as they were over thirty years ago. The producer’s crowning moment comes with newsreel footage of the fatal accident of a cyclist whose shattered remains were exposed to the camera’s eye. Shots of paramedics were greedily devoured as they retrieved blood clots, brain matter and clumps of hair from the tarmac. Such grisly imagery was broadcasted virtually every night to an audience who had become almost blasé; their seeming immunity to this extreme content had previously provided the catalyst four years before for Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Stock footage went on to record more accidents and airline disasters but much of the film, including the autopsy scenes, executions, the ravages of an alligator and a bear, were staged by the production crew.

  John Alan Schwartz’s documentary has revelled in its widespread ban spanning more than forty countries. This prohibition was at times only temporary, but it bequeathed Faces of Death a welcome notoriety that has continued with each passing year to be its key selling point. Schwartz’s feature was a clever exercise in audience manipulation, but it was surprisingly very reasonably produced by a team of experts. While there were objections to the creators’ attempt to blur the line between fact and fiction, it was a teenage sensation seeker’s delight. Such was its success, Faces of Death was succeeded by five sequels, each sadly characterized by increasingly diminishing standards of production.

  IN THE SAME year as the Los Angeles Olympic Games, Michael Elliot introduced his own version of the Olympiad with Fatal Games, which started life as The Killing Touch, and later saw release in Holland in a title that captured the magic of that year, Olympic Nightmare. There were elements in this film that bore a close resemblance to Herb Freed’s Graduation Day (1981), but even with the Olympic backdrop Elliot’s feature lacked its predecessor’s eighties kitsch. The athletes and gymnasts of Falcon Academy of Athletics are lined up to test their physical abilities against other hopefuls for the forthcoming Olympics. Hiding in the background, a typically obscured figure broods obviously contemptuous of this gathering and, for reasons known only to him, decides to put an end to their hopes, on this occasion armed with a javelin. His fitting choice of weapon could have made for some interesting kills, indeed the first entry was a huge surprise, but the audience became frustrated as the gore was kept to an absolute minimum. Instead they were presented with that other teenage hankering, female nudity, and there was plenty of it. This nubile excess, however, was counteracted by a storyline that was overly concerned with family values and the sacrifice of relationships as the athletes pursued their goal. There was a long list of suspects that was to keep the viewer guessing, but Elliot’s film never quite hit the mark as a credible slasher movie.

  AS NIGHT DRAWS in over a tranquil lovers’ lane, a young couple relish the heat of a few torrid moments in the back of their car. Their fervour lasts for only a few moments, because the girl is sure she can hear something nearby and urges her boyfriend to put the top back over the convertible. Then someone bangs against the car and climbs onto the bonnet before tearing open the roof. In terror, the young man tries to speed away but the figure seizes hold of him and repeatedly thrusts his blade. As the opening credits roll on screen, the girl can be heard hysterically screaming.

  It’s the end of the year at Lanier College, with most students having left for the holidays and the seniors about to take their final exams. Among them are the very likeable Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi) and her geek friend Radish (Joel S. Rice). Radish has already heard of the lovers’ lane murders and revels in repulsing his friends with all of the grisly details. For the best part of an hour the audience come to know the assembled cast and chuckle at their tomfoolery; there are the usual sub-plots and a few misleading shocks before the killing finally begins. The last half hour sees the students being disposed of in a movie that endorses suspense rather than an abundance of blood and guts. The ever-diminishing number of students has Courtney finally pitted against a stalker, who evidences little in the way of motive other than a desire to kill and has nothing to do with the various strings to the plot, other than the fact he gets a kick out of vicious murder.

  Jimmy Huston overcame a limited budget to nurture a sense of inescapable dread as every shadow became tainted in menace, even when the film appeared to be laughing along during the lull of the first hour. Having augmented the terror, Huston should also be praised for bringing out the best in what was an inexperienced cast. If Final Exam was to be criticized it would have been for its uncompromising adherence to so much of the formula that had already come to epitomize these films. For the slasher purists, however, this would inevitably make this film a hidden gem. Huston, like Carpenter before him, kept the tide of blood to a minimum, while his kills proved incisive and at times ingenious.

  AMIDST THE BEAUTIFULLY filmed Californian backwoods, a group of forest rangers, coupled with their girlfriends, enjoy a short camping holiday. As they trek to their camp they pass a mental institution, which stirs a few obvious comments. Later that night while sitting around the fire the head ranger recounts the tale of the family who once lived in these parts and how the uncle, who was the family breadwinner, had raped the daughter. Fearing her family would lose everything, she kept her trauma buried away inside. Her anguish resulted in a complete breakdown and her being admitted to the institution they had come upon earlier in the day. Her mental state was such there was no option but to have the child adopted. Nineteen years later, her child had g
rown up and when he returned to visit her and then set her free to roam the woods. At this point a member of the group, who has been irritating throughout, becomes disgruntled and leaves the party. Then one by one, in this isolated landscape, the campers begin to disappear, the victim of a killer who can disguise themselves with leaves and moss and blend into the foliage and rock topography. Those who survive unite to take on the evil that has spent the last hour slaughtering their loved ones. At the last, they learn the reality behind the prowler in the woods and a few truths about their cantankerous colleague.

  Andrew Davies’s entry to the slasher years, which also went by the names The Campsite Murders and Forest Primeval, proved to be something of a disappointment for the hardcore lovers of violence and sleaze. Obviously inspired by the immense success of Friday the 13th, with elements of The Burning, his film also paid homage to John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), placing the cast at the mercy of the enormity of this remote wilderness. Shot in 1981, Davies’s movie had to be shelved when a distributor couldn’t be found, owing largely to the fact his feature just didn’t know what it wanted to be. While sumptuously photographed, it struggled to be a bona fide horror movie, lacking the tension and the degree of violence that had become essential to these years of hack and slash terror. The build up to the finale certainly kept the audience on the edge of their seats, but the film failed to live up to the expectation threatened in the title. The Final Terror wasn’t released until 1983 when Daryl Hannah and Adrian Zmed had made their ascent to stardom. Soon after, Davies would go on to greater success with Under Siege (1992) and The Fugitive (1993).

  UDO KIER OFFERED a perverse interpretation of a Baron Frankenstein who dreams of a proto-Nazi styled super-race returning to his Serbian homeland, a breed that mirrors the god-like deities of ancient Greece. Assisted by his loyal aide Otto, he turns to the hideous crime of stealing corpses to create a beautiful female monster, stitched together from numerous bodies. The time is now ready for him to bequeath her a handsome male partner to serve as her lover and give life to a new race of superior offspring brainwashed into his way of thinking. While the baron enjoys his insane fantasy, his insatiable wife Katherine, who could well be his sister (Monique Van Vooren), takes pleasure in her heated affiliation with the stable-boy, Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro). The husband and wife, or is it brother and sister, also have a strange relationship with their offspring, grooming them to one day stand in their shoes. In Nicholas, the Baron is convinced he has found the perfect brain to guide the statuesque body he has so carefully constructed. When he attempts to remove the head of his wife’s lover, he mistakenly decapitates his friend, who appears to be gay. When the Baron performs what will be the final operation on his creature, he has dreams that the bizarre couple will very soon begin to mate, but his experiment soon runs out of control, leading to a ghastly finale. The closing chapter is an unholy bloodbath, which pushes ever further into the realms of depravity.

  The Gothic-styled Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula (1974) were made back-to-back using virtually the same cast and crew with Andy Warhol’s name exploited purely to improve the film’s marketability. Director Paul Morrissey, a long-time friend of Warhol, created a bizarre parody dripping with blood, incestuous couplings, necrophilia, the visceral splitting of stomachs, impalements, not to mention a huge amount of severed body parts, and while this madness was going on he laced it with sex coupled with a darkly comedic dialogue. In a film that was actually considered mainstream by comparison to his earlier more experimental works, Morrissey used the inspiration of Italian horror movies to stretch the boundaries of American horror cinema, merging an overindulgence of gore with explicit perversity. The photography was strangely colourful, making the on-screen blood and guts resemble an outrageous comic book; and then Morrissey’s team made preparations to release their effort in 3-D, ready to pour the grisly excess all over their audience. Conjecture remains as to whether Antonio Margheriti was actually involved with this film, as it has been suggested that his name was only ever used to draw in the Italian audience.

  On its release, Morrissey’s movie was understandably considered controversial and there was never any doubt that the American censors were going to be alarmed by its extreme profusion of sex and gore. They had no choice but to give it an “X”-rating. Two years later, and with only eight minutes of cuts, it was granted a similar certificate in the UK. The video was released in 1981 as it was originally screened (minus the 3-D effect), and then again in 1983 with just over two minutes of cuts; both were subsequently banned and placed on the DPP’s list of video nasties in March 1984. There the film stayed until the panic in the UK had died down. The complete version wasn’t to be approved on this side of the Atlantic until 2006, when British horror fans finally got to see Morrissey’s insane piece of intemperance.

  ACAR TRAVELS ALONG a dirt track, which winds its way through a dense forest. When the track comes to an end two men (James Hart and John Kuhi) leave the vehicle and begin to trail through the woods. Within minutes, their path brings them to a campsite; as they slowly move in, they are forced to shoot a semi-naked woman with the bullet hitting her in the throat. In the gunfight that follows, they are killed by her hippie associates. The two men were Federal Officers on an assignment to locate a crop of marijuana. Their boss (Paul Haskin) now puts a plan into place to have the entire area sprayed with an experimental herbicide, known as Dromax; his intention is to destroy the illegal crop. Back in the forest, the hippies return to gather their harvest, but as they go about their illegal trade, they become covered in the spray as it rains down from a plane circling overhead. Very soon, they are coughing up blood, their skin turns pale and then they begin their rampage transformed into bloodthirsty mindless zombies. For the duration of the film, this contaminated band will shamble through the woods slaughtering anything that falls their way. Only the forest ranger Tom Cole (Charles McCrann) along with his wife Polly (Beverly Shapiro) and half brother Jay (Philip Garfinkel) can put an end to this carnage, but don’t expect a happy ending; this feature takes a rather downbeat turn, one that is very much in keeping with zombie lore of the past four decades.

  For his one and only movie, shot in Pennsylvania during 1979, Charles McCrann assumed the role of director as well as writer, in addition to taking a leading role. McCrann also edited and produced his project, which is known alternatively as Bloodeaters, Blood Butchers and Toxic Zombies. This wasn’t truly a zombie movie, although Craig Harris’s low-budget make-up was very effective; it was, however, an interesting precursor to the backwoods slasher that would soon come to prominence. Over the years, there has been much criticism of the movie’s often static photography, even though the point-of-view shots worked to build a degree of tension as the victims chased through the dense forest undergrowth. By comparison to the sensationalistic movies of its time the gore was far from excessive. However, when it was in evidence, the camera seemed to delight in languorously dwelling upon the stump of an arm as it liberally spurted blood and then altered its focus to labour over a knife to the eye, before moving on to a bloodthirsty bite to the throat. These scenes would be seen as being little more than gratuitous violence and would bring this film to the attention of the DPP after its release to video in November 1982; twelve months later it was banned and has remained so for almost thirty years. McCrann would always remember his efforts with a fondness, often talking of his experiences as he went on to enjoy a very successful career in insurance brokerage. Sadly he too became a victim of mindless violence, losing his life during the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

  MANY YEARS AGO in the summer of 1958, two camp counsellors at Camp Crystal Lake slip away from the campfire to steal a few moments of intimacy. As they undress, an unseen attacker stealthily makes his way towards them with bloody murder in mind. The story then leaps forward twenty-two years to a young woman named Annie (Robbi Morgan) as she enters a small diner hoping to obtain directions to Camp Crystal Lake. Her simple request
provokes considerable alarm, and to add to her dismay a strange old timer named Ralph (Walt Gorney) warns that those at the camp are all doomed. As she continues on her journey, she learns how a young boy drowned in Crystal Lake in 1957, only a year before the murders of the counsellors. Soon after, she hitches a ride from another driver, whom the viewer never gets to see, and falls victim to a hunting-knife, as her throat is viciously slashed.

  The scene shifts to the camp as the other counsellors, Ned (Mark Nelson), Jack (Kevin Bacon), Bill (Harry Crosby), Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), Alice (Adrienne King) and Brenda (Laurie Bartram) busily work away on the cabins and the camp’s facilities. They too receive a visit from old Ralph, who repeats his ill-starred warning. In the distance, the rumble of a violent storm can be heard, presaging the nightmare to come.